Google Goes Radically Transparent: Unedited Meeting Video

I’m old enough to remember the days when Google was the scrawny upstart and the king of Internet search was Yahoo. Oh, how times have changed. Yahoo now struggles to survive and Google is a giant. One of the downsides of Google’s meteoric rise is that it’s lost a little big of their original mojo. Google controls so much now it seems like just another large, dominant company. It’s lost some of it’s personality and charm. Many even view Google with suspicion and wonder about it’s “do no evil” credo.

Just recently, Google has done something I think is pretty extraordinary. They have posted an 8 minuet video of an engineering meeting on Google search. Completely unedited and unscripted. It’s not particularly thrilling viewing as it’s filled with technical talk about how the spelling corrections work in Google search, but it’s a fascinating look inside one of the world more important companies. It helps people realize there are actual people behind the giant company, people who care about the product they are producing.

So much of what we see from large corporations are heavily produced and edited video and productions. The message crafted. Can you imagine Apple doing much a thing as this? Not in a million years. People like behind the scenes stuff anyway. I wish more companies would have the courage to do things like this. It is moving much closer to what I call talking in a human voice. Being this way and realting better to your customers and prospects is one of the largest strategic advantages smaller companies have against their larger rivals who often are not capable of doing it. Bravo to Goggle on this move.